25th Amendment Follies

Watching Trump this weekend is like watching a beagle in a vacuum cleaner factory.

We all know by now that The Russian Usurper has accused his predecessor The Kenyan Usurper of having a “tapp” (the second ‘p’ is silent, methinks, or maybe that’s how they spell it in Russian?) on the phones at Trump Tower, which on the face of it is absurd: preznints cannot order a wire tap, though I bet you Trump is trying to order one. Probably right this very minute. But I’m only guessing.

Ratcheting up his attacks on predecessor Barack Obama, President Trump called Sunday for a congressional investigation into whether “executive branch investigative powers were abused” by his predecessor during last year’s election.

“Reports concerning potentially politically motivated investigations immediately ahead of the 2016 election are very troubling,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said in a statement a day after Trump accused Obama — without evidence — of having him wiretapped in connection with an investigation of Russia.

Trump is “requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016,” Spicer said,

While Trump repeatedly tweeted about Obama during the weekend, Spicer’s statement said “neither the White House nor the President will comment further until such oversight is conducted.”

I wish that were true, but I know that the fool is going to

comment, tweet,

dither, and bleat.

(I liked that, it scans well.)

This ought to put Jason Chaffetz panties in a bunch. While Chaffetz has declared that his committee will not investigate Russian interference in the 2016 Goat Rodeo (or much of anything else except emails and benghazi! Benghazi! BENGHAZI!!11!), now he’s being ordered to investigate Hair Führer’s predecessor for abusing the office of the President while not investigating what that abuse was about? Or something? Which sounds like abuse of power right there. Go figure.

He’s losing it, folks. What little grasp he had on reality is slipping out of his tiny, orange, prehensile fingers.

UPDATE 1: Yup, a press release:

UPDATE 2: This is the fruit of Mike Huckabee’s loins (eww, gross), and not the dog-torturing one, slandering President Obama:

— SENATE MINORITY LEADER CHUCK SCHUMER to TODD: “Well look, President Obama has flatly denied that he [ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower]. And either way, Chuck, the President’s in trouble. If he falsely spread this kind of misinformation, that is so wrong. It’s beneath the dignity of the presidency. It is something that really hurts people’s view of government. It’s civilization-warping, as Ben Sasse, conservative Republican, called it. And I don’t know of any president, Democrat or Republican in the past, has done this. It shows this president doesn’t know how to conduct himself.

“On the other hand, if it’s true, it’s even worse for the president. Because that means that a federal judge, independently elected, has found probable cause that the president, or people on his staff, have probable cause to have broken the law or to have interacted with a foreign agent. Now that’s serious stuff. So either way, the president makes it worse with these tweets. Now, is he trying to divert things here? Yeah. The president denied this. I don’t have any doubt to doubt — I don’t have any doubt that President Obama has been telling the truth.”

I think that, in a coke-fueled 4AM berserkergang, Trump got paranoid about Jake Tapper, imagined he’d been tapped, then shifted the blame onto his Kenyan Nemesis. As the Kinks so wittily noted, paranoia may destroy ya!

I think tRumpp saw that Obama was named the 2017 “Profile in Courage” award honoree by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and it set him off, again. He knows that outside his immediate family no one likes him.

Very low-key morning for the Twitterer-In-Chief.
Nothing like the “FIRE WORKS!” of yesterday.

I actually hadn’t read the So-Called President’s Twitter thingy before.
ITS A HOOT!!!! Making Amerika Grate, One Tweet at a Time.
That responder guy Christoph Rehage kills me.
If he’s not a Mockhead, he should be.
Seriously.

He’s going to have to fuck up worse than this, a lot worse than this, before the GOP leadership can risk turning on him.
This kind of diversionary “I’m the real victim here” bullshit is fucking catnip to the true believers, and the true believers make up by far the dominant portion of the GOP base. Enough to precipitate a party schism if they start to believe they (and Trump) are being betrayed by party leaders.

So, a couple of questions, then;
Will Trump find a way to fuck up so badly that it disillusions the true believers, so that the GOP can ditch him and move on without the party falling apart?
And;
If he does, will we survive it?
After all, it’s not as if there’s any evidence for an upper limit on their dishonesty and dangerous and manipulative insanity, and an equal absence of evidence for McConnell or Ryan having any kind of upper limit on their spectacular duplicity.

I would expect (and heartily approve) –should they have had sufficient information relating to say, o idunno, Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign?– the previous administration tapping STFU Donnie’s lines. And, if so, I imagine a formal FISA warrant was both submitted and approved.

Further, because no one in the current WH understands much less plays ‘the long game’, I can see the Obama administration salting the wiretap ‘fact’ with one of Donnie’s minions who, being a dimwit himself, whispers it into his boss’s ear. Said bit of info so enraging STFU Donnie he releases Saturday morning’s Twitter storm Obama’s way and demands a Congressional investigates.

Where putative investigation is sure to run across US Intelligence further agency sourced and “deeply vetted” information tying STFU Donnie & His Minions to the Russians…

The denials are becoming worse than ever. I can’t wait for some actual fall out from this. Probably never going to happen either with all three branches on his side.
The Thing That Worries Me, is what is he (Bannon) distracting us from by following this tidbit?
There are a slew of Bad laws for one, and who knows what else.
This is a game of distractions and feints and so far the other team is winning, (whining?)
We need to follow more than the latest distraction to win at this.
w3ski

Trumpp was so fired up on this rant that he managed to get at least a couple of those tweets twatted within five minutes of each other. This is an amazing achievement … for him.
I did imagine him twitting one off and then pacing around and working up another head of steam when I looked at the screenshots, though.

I know! The visuals in my mind of him shooting steam out of his ears just starts me giggling. The guy is a living Warner-Brothers cartoon, but without the empathy or humanity. I can watch him step on rakes and take a self-inflicted pie to the face all day long.

The FBI Directorship is something like a 10-year appointment (to avoid having loyalty issues). He can only be impeached to remove him from office (I believe), to make him immune to political pressure from preznints. Which is not to say that Hair Führer cannot ask for his resignation (or that Comey won’t give it), but Trump cannot demand it.

The history of the modern conservative movement has been one of projection.

* The term “left-wing media” crops up about the time they were building a right-wing noise machine.
* They accuse every Democrat of being the “most liberal” candidate ever, as they run-out an ever increasingly insane slate of tea-partyers and anti-governance un-reconstructed Southerners.

You can build you own list fairly easily.

Trump accuses his predecessor of illegal wiretapping under the primary evidentiary notion that that is what he would do under similar circumstances.